It’s a pity that Jessops no longer sell their glossy photo papers. I don’t know where they sourced their papers from when they did sell them, but their glossy photo papers were superb - on a par with glossy photo papers from Canon or Epson. I bought a lot of boxes from them many years ago.
I have almost 100 sheets left, and still use them (with generic ‘glossy photo’ ICC profiles in Epson Print Layout) for my A4 prints.
Whilst I had some Fotospeed ICC profiles sent to me which worked okay on their papers, if I’m honest I was happy just with glossy, semi gloss or matt papers from Canon. My priority has always been to get images taken, processed and then printed, faffing about with multitudes of different papers is fine if you have the resources to buy the paper and accept the cost testing which works for each image.
The other consideration is that it is mainly myself and the boss who see the images, its not as though I am putting on an exhibition of my images, I’m not that good, so sticking with the brand papers works fine for me.
I’ll be interested to follow how you guys get on with Epson, I did have an Epson A4 printer some years ago and it was a pain with dried ink blocking nozzles, not an issue I have had with Canon, so maybe just old tech and things have moved on.
I’ve not had any problems with the ET-8550 so far. I think that the longest period without printing has been around 5 or 6 weeks. I have had nozzle clogging in the distant past with a much older Epson printer, but also with my Canon A4 printer that I still use.
I think quite a lot of the problems people have is when they try to economise using cheaper 3rd party inks. I know I’ve been guilty of this myself in the past. One of the best things about the EcoTank printers is that the genuine Epson Ink refills are so cheap by comparison with ink cartridge replacements on standard printers that there is no longer a temptation to experiment.
I have never used 3rd party ink but have known that the Ink cost for my Canon is high, its only the entry level A3+ (8750) printer but the cost of a full set of Canon XL ink cartridges is around £90. If the Epson is cheaper then it might be worth me investigating whether to get one or not, but first I need to get out and take some images worthy of printing.
Full set of 6xEpson bottles is about £70-£80 it seems. Same as my Canon MG tiddly cartridges x 6.
I filled the Epson from the supplied bottles when I got it and then topped up the tanks from what was left after it did its initial charge.
Done about two dozen A3/A3+ prints, about 15 A4 and lots of 6:4 and 7:5. Then 50+ pages of plain paper docs with colour graphs. Tanks are still full.
Which is very nice, the Canon would be about done by now, if it made it that far, especially as it would seem to do a charge of some description pretty much every time I switched it on, which the Epson doesn’t.
I can second Jamiewednesday’s reply. Ink costs for the Epson EcoTank printers are very significantly less than that of any comparable cartridge based printers. Not sure exactly how much, but I would guess a factor of 5 or 6 times cheaper - probably quite a bit more!
IKEA offer a strong range of affordable frames in various sizes. Haven’t bought any myself but I browsed the last time I was there and many of them looked pretty reasonable for an off the peg, cheap option. And you can buy online.
Some camera’s won’t wind on or fire if batteries are flat.
I once bought a mint Mamiya 645 at auction for a very very good price, due to the shutter appearing to be stuck open. Not only does it not work when the batteries are flat, but once batteries are replaced it still won’t work until a specific procedure is carried out. Something like setting speed to B before switch on.???
It will be interesting to see who it compares to the Nikon Z9, no doubt it will be a couple of years development ahead of the Nikon but it shouldn’t have people jumping ship from one brand to another.
Quite hideous, particularly coming from the company which produced the F-1 (on a par with Nikon’s F series of professional cameras) and the super-smart A-1, both highly sought after by serious camera collectors.